(~5 minutes to read)
Today, I listened to a speaker talk about the need to connect with your uninhibited, playful inner child in order to access your creativity and confidence. She spoke of childlike curiosity—I don’t think she was referring to the way kids explore the insides of their noses–and opined on the ease with which the very young mix with their peers.[1]
No doubt many of us have heard similar advice in varying contexts and forums over the years; I know I have. It’s just that this speaker made the point more convincingly than I’ve heard others do.
But although that speech was the trigger for this week’s ramble, it’s not really the focus of it. My own attempts to reconnect with my childhood are.
Many Brits over the last seventy or eighty years grew up reading Enid Blyton books. I did. Mrs. H. did. Both our hatchlings did. Blyton’s books have sold over six hundred million copies and according to Wikipedia, are still enormously popular.
I recently started re-reading Blyton’s “The Famous Five” series.
For the uninitiated, The Famous Five are siblings Julian, Dick and Anne, their tomboy cousin George (Georgina), and George’s dog, Timmy. In the first book (written in 1942), they are twelve, eleven, ten, and eleven years old, respectively—we never learn Timmy’s age, although we can guess at two. In the twenty-one adventures they have, they track down crooks, solve mysteries, rescue kidnappees, recover long-lost treasure, and probably discover the identity of Jack the Ripper too. They take on gun-toting robbers, smugglers and spies, armed with nothing more than middle-class accents, tons of spunk, and lashings of ginger-beer.
For the sensitive among us, the stories are safe to read, because fair play is done, the baddies don’t shoot (or stab or club) first and ask questions later, there’s not that much ill treatment of children or animals, and the bad guy always gets his.
Actually, I should have qualified the word “sensitive”. If, like me, you abhor exploitation of people, justice not being meted out, and gratuitous violence, then the stories are safe. If you are dismayed by pre-twenty-first-century attitudes to country, class, creed, or sex/gender, then you might not like Blyton’s books so much.
Our heroes (and heroines—we are discussing books that contain gender-specific nomenclature and characterisations!) are remarkably mature and capable for their ages. In book five for example, we learn that they can all drive a horse-drawn trailer (caravan) along the country roads of England. Ten-year-old Anne is an accomplished cook and housekeeper, especially under camp conditions. And Julian can face off, stare down and out-argue most antagonistic working-class adults, especially if they’re up to no good.
The children’s appetites (and Timmy’s) are the stuff of legends. They seem to eat four huge meals a day, with bacon, ham, eggs, and cake being the principal feature of most breakfasts. By rights, all five of them—yes, Timmy included—should be morbidly obese, but their adventures and antics (or Blyton’s overlooking the laws of physics) keep them in trim.
When they go camping or caravanning or whatever, we’re sometimes treated to a detailed list of what they plan to take.
And because of that huge food intake and the detailed gear inventories, there’s one thing that stands out as a glaring omission from the narrative—the need for the children to… ahem… “make themselves comfy”. There’s no latrine shelter mentioned; no spade, no toilet paper… And there’s no reference to watering the flowers, squatting behind a tree, or availing oneself of a dock leaf or two.
Blyton’s books aren’t unique in that respect—I don’t recall a single children’s book that does acknowledge this most basic of human needs. Perhaps more recently-written ones do. After all, teenager TV dramas these days (UK ones, at least) depict that age group’s inclination to what I shall politely call auto-exploration, many movies incorporate scenes that take place in the bathroom, and what are known as “late-night comedies” on Netflix and elsewhere wouldn’t be complete without someone perched on the porcelain throne or talking to God through the great white megaphone. So it’s reasonable to suppose that modern children’s books include mentions of potty time.
According to my mum’s records (Me? Packrat? Me!), I read at least six of the Famous Five series as a child—numbers 5, 12, 14, 10, 16, and 13. Strangely, I don’t recall thinking it odd that nobody ever needed the toilet.
This time around, I’m on the seventh of the series, I’m reading them in sequence, and I spotted the lack of loo time straight away. Either my OCD and toilet awareness hadn’t developed back then, or my mum had to get whatever the library had on their shelves and I accepted that Dick taking a dump wasn’t critical to the plotline.
Enid Blyton probably played a huge part in shaping my worldview, which, given that her depiction of life is through rose-tinted spectacles, explains why I have a totally unrealistic expectation of humanity. Maybe by reading the whole series as an adult, I might finally grasp that the world is an unfair place where idiots govern us, gangs operate with impunity, vulnerable sectors of the population are exploited, shoddy work is passed off as something much better, and the key to success is marketing rather than ability.
According to what I read about her, Enid Blyton herself discovered that last societal imperfection about halfway through her writing career. I wonder if she wrote any books about marketing and branding? If so, then perhaps she may once again influence the path my life takes!
But back to connecting with your inner child in order to tap into your creativity. That theory has one major flaw.
What if you were born middle-aged?
[1] (We’re talking in generalizations here, so please don’t get all huffy with me if your child is one of those who don’t fit this convenient stereotype.)